I
read in the papers that the FBI has charged two more U.S. citizens with
conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaida. The two, it is
alleged, were enthusiastic followers of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Dr.
Rafiq Abdus Sabir, 50, of Boca Raton, Fla., and Tarik Shah, 42, of New
York, a martial arts expert and jazz musician, are currently being held
without bail. They got busted as the result of an FBI sting, and the Feds
say they have it all on tape.

Now, I haven’t a clue whether these two are bad guys, but since they
haven’t had a trial yet, the Constitution says they’re presumed innocent.

Beyond that, though, you’ll pardon me if I approach this with just a tad
of skepticism.

The reason is that the track records of the FBI, the immigration guys at
the Department of Homeland Security, the “few bad apples” who brought us
Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and the sometimes over-zealous lawyers in
the Justice Department, aren’t all that reassuring.

Consider two of the government’s most recent “terrorism” cases.

There’s the case of the two 16-year-old Muslim girls arrested in New York
and detained in Pennsylvania for six weeks as would-be suicide bombers.
The government quietly released one of the girls pending deportation to
Guinea and allowed the other one to return to Bangladesh with her family.

They did not know one another. They were taken into custody separately
March 24 and held at a detention center. The Bangladeshi girl, her mother,
and two brothers have left the country voluntarily, according to the
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Service, part of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Her name is being withheld
because she is a minor not charged with any crime.

The agency has insisted the girls were never accused of crimes, only
administrative immigration violations.

Yet, media reports at the time of their arrest cited a government document
that said the FBI believed the girls posed ''an imminent threat to the
security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be
suicide bombers.''

Federal officials have refused to provide any additional details.

The matter has been shrouded in secrecy, marked by closed hearings and
sealed declarations. Lawyers have been barred from disclosing information
held by the government.

In
another strange case, this one involving domestic defendants, prosecutors
have not yet let go.

A
year ago, Hope Kurtz died of a heart attack in the northern New York State
city of Buffalo. Her husband, Steve, an art professor at the University of
Buffalo, called police and the emergency medical services.

What the police saw when they got to the Kurtz home, aside from Hope
Kurtz's body and a distraught husband, were vials, bacterial cultures, and
an assortment of laboratory equipment including a mobile DNA extracting
machine used for testing food products for genetic contamination.

Kurtz explained to the police that these were some of the materials for an
art exhibit he and his wife had been preparing on genetic modification.
The Kurtzes were founders of a group called ''The Critical Art Ensemble'',
a collective of ''tactical media'' protest and performance artists.

The police did not buy his story. They called the FBI. A hazardous
materials team carried out testing. County health officials declared the
Kurtz home a potential health risk and sealed it for two days while a
state lab examined the bacterial cultures found inside.

They confiscated Hope's body and Steve's computer, notebooks, and art
supplies. They cordoned off part of the street, quarantined the Kurtz
home, and took Steve to a hotel, where the FBI questioned him for two
days.

Meanwhile, the special agent in charge of the Buffalo FBI office gave
interviews to the press.

Officials eventually made it known that there was no danger to public
health, and Kurtz was allowed to move back to his home.

But federal authorities obviously thought something in the Kurtz home was
illegal, because prosecutors subsequently convened a grand jury, with
Kurtz as its target. Instead of bioterrorism, he was indicted for mail
and wire fraud, charges normally used against those defrauding others of
money or property, as in telemarketing schemes.

Also indicted was Robert Ferrell, head of the Department of Genetics at
the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, for allegedly
helping Kurtz obtain $256 worth of bacteria for one of his art projects.

In
Buffalo, a judge heard motions to dismiss the federal criminal case
against Kurtz, whose attorney argued that a dangerous precedent would be
set by ''exalting'' into a federal crime a case of wire and mail fraud,
which is customarily a minor, civil contract issue -- the purchase of the
bacterium Serratia marcescens by scientist Ferrell for use in Kurtz's
artwork.

The prosecutor acknowledged that there is no federal law or regulation
concerning Serratia, whose alleged danger forms the basis of the
government's argument for making this a criminal case.

Kurtz's lawyer further argued that the FBI intentionally misled a judge
into issuing the original search warrant. The judge was told of Kurtz's
possession of a photograph of an exploded car with Arabic writing beside
it, but not of the photograph's context: An invitation to a museum art
show. The original warrant called for the seizure of anything with Arabic
writing.

Even if the judge grants the motion and throws out the case, Kurtz's
lawyer says it is certain that the prosecution will appeal the decision.

No
trial date has yet been set. But while the case is pending, FBI agents
have been talking with people connected with Kurtz -- museum curators in
Massachusetts and the state of Washington, colleagues in New York and
California, and current students at Buffalo.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an
internationally recognized legal authority on civil liberties, says, “Not
one person of the more than 5,000 locked up as a foreign national in
preventive detention by (former Attorney General) John Ashcroft was ever
convicted of a terrorist crime. The only convictions have been of U.S.
citizens. Ashcroft labeled them as suspected terrorists, but it turned out
they had nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever.”

Cole recalls that on September 2, 2004, “a federal judge in Detroit threw
out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a
terrorism charge since 9/11.”

In
October 2001, he adds, “shortly after the men were initially arrested,
Ashcroft heralded the case in a national press conference as evidence of
the success of his anti-terror campaign. The indictment alleged that the
defendants were associated with Al Qaeda and planning terrorist attacks.”

But Ashcroft, he recalls, “held no news conference in September when the
case was dismissed, nor did he offer any apologies to the defendants who
had spent nearly three years in jail.”

The Detroit case was dismissed at the request of the DOJ because the
prosecution failed to disclose to the defense evidence that other
government experts did not consider the sketches and videotape to be
terrorist casing materials at all and that the government's key witness
had admitted to lying.

“When the Attorney General was locking these men up in the immediate wake
of the (9/11) attacks”, Cole says, “he held almost daily press conferences
to announce how many ‘suspected terrorists’ had been detained. No press
conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have
turned out to be actual terrorists.”

The DOJ has brought several other high-profile prosecutions. Among them is
the case of “The Lackawanna Six.” Arrested in the Yemeni community of this
old steel town in upstate New York, the six young men were charged under
the federal anti-terrorism statute with providing material support to al-Quaida,
which, prior to September 11, 2001, had been designated by the Secretary
of State as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Specifically, the men were charged with providing “material support” in
the form of training. The training consisted of paying for a uniform,
attending the training camp where they learned to use weapons, and
standing guard duty. The charges against them also specified viewing
videotapes of the bombing of the USS Cole and speeches by Osama Bin-Laden.

None of the defendants engaged in acts that were, at the time, obviously
criminal in nature. It was not until several months after their return
from Afghanistan that planes crashed into the World Trade Center. The six
young men agree to plead guilty to providing “material support” to al
Qaeda. Prosecutors said the defendants belonged to a terrorist “sleeper
cell.” The defendants claim they pled guilty because the FBI threatened to
send them to Guantanamo Bay.

So, as to two the most recent arrests, watch this space for further news
of Dr. Sabir and Mr. Shah.

William Fisher writes for
InterPress News Service. He has managed economic development programs
in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US
Agency for International Development. He served in the international
affairs area during the Kennedy Administration.